Various American Misadventures - Sept 2015

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As this will be the last new thread on my third American trip, here is a mixed bag of all the locations I explored which ended up yielding not enough photos for a separate thread all heaped together in one tidy mess.

Union Carbide

This was a revisit for me, I had first explored this place last year but the people I were with had never been, and after the ridiculously tight access into St. Mary's Manor we needed something easy. As we ventured inside, the heavens opened and rain started pouring down, and not long after that the noise of the rain was broken by shouts and smashing sounds as some local shits turned up, which we took as our cue to leave.

Union Carbide was the company responsible for the Bhopal disaster, and their old facility in Niagara Falls is one of, if not the most polluted location I have ever explored.

Wildroot Hair Tonic Factory

After we left Union Carbide we had a few more fails, and in the dying light of the afternoon headed to what should have been an easy in/out explore. Wildroot was a company that manufactured hair tonics and their factory in Buffalo has been derelict for decades and is nothing more than a ruined shell. The explore was quick, as it's in a pretty shady neighbourhood but it was coming out when it all went pear shaped. We walked back to our car parked by the train tracks nearby and noticed a CSX Police SUV doing a u-turn infront of our car (CSX being the main American railway company). We knew as soon as we saw it we were going to get pulled over when we drove off and sure enough, the SUV followed us. We pulled over and to cut a long story with a few nailbiting moments short, we all very narrowly avoided getting arrested. Had the police officer not been almost at the end of his shift, and had he phoned to get the real Buffalo PD down to search us and the car, we would have all been in some deep proverbial doo-doo and I would have been spending a night in the cells. As it was, he let us off with a warning although he was trying to pin stuff on us and get us to admit to things. American police are not the cuddly friendly neighbourhood bobbies seen in the UK, believe me...

Hollow House

While waiting for some of my companions to get their crap together, me and one of my new found American friends went for a little adventure by ourselves to this old restaurant/apartment building on the edge of town. Not a huge amount to see but it was quite interesting seeing a house totally demolished internally right back to the wooden skeleton. The ground floor housed a restaurant and upstairs was a two floor apartment.

Hobart Stone Dealers

Almost opposite the Hollow House is an old quarry used as a dump site for a local stone dealers, with a couple of old vehicles and a whole load of the sorts of stone used in lots of American graveyards as headstones around the place.

Trestle Bridge

Bit of a cheeky one this, as it's a live railway, but I've always wanted to shoot a bridge.

DL&W Roundhouse

Lastly, a revisit to a place I first saw in the snow back in March. The only surviving railway roundhouse in New York State.

I only took a couple of photos as I wasn't really there to shoot the place, I was there to shoot a model.

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Built in 1896 and in continuous use until 1995, this pinwheel style quaker prison was a reflection of a similar one located nearby. You can tour that one for a few dollars and take as many pictures as you like. This one was not so easy....

It was the site of a controversial decades-long dermatological, pharmaceutical, and biochemical weapons research projects involving testing on inmates.

The prison is also notable for several major riots in the early 1970s.

The prison was home to several trials which raised several ethical and moral questions pertaining to the extent to which humans can be experimented on. In many cases, inmates chose to undergo several inhumane trials for the sake of small monetary reward. The prison was viewed as a human laboratory.
“All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.” Dr. X

One inmate described experiments involving exposure to microwave radiation, sulfuric and carbonic acid, solutions which corroded and reduced forearm epidermis to a leather-like substance, and acids which blistered skin in the testicular areas.

In addition to exposure to harmful chemical agents, patients were asked to physically exert themselves and were immediately put under the knife to remove sweat glands for examination. In more gruesome accounts, fragments of cadavers were stitched into the backs of inmates to determine if the fragments could grow back into functional organs.

So common was the experimentation that in the 1,200-person prison facility, around 80% to 90% of inmates could be seen experimented on.

The rise of testing harmful substances on human subjects first became popularized in the United States when President Woodrow Wilson allowed the Chemical Warfare Service (CAWS) during World War I.

All inmates who were tested upon in the trials had consented to the experimentation, however, they mostly agreed for incentives like monetary compensation. Experiments in the prison often paid around $30 to $50 and even as much as $800. “I was in prison with a low bail. I couldn’t afford the monies to pay for bail. I knew that I wasn’t guilty of what I was being held for. I was being coerced to plea bargain. So, I thought, if I can get out of this, get me enough money to get a lawyer, I can beat this. That was my first thought.”

I expected to find an epic medical ward only to be filled with disappointment. The practice was so common I can only assume it was conducted everywhere.

Many advocates of the prison trials, such as Solomon McBride, who was an administrator of the prisons, remained convinced that there was nothing wrong with the experimentation at the Holmesburg prison. McBride argued that the experiments were nothing more than strapping patches of cloth with lotion or cosmetics onto the backs of patients and argued this was a means for prisoners to earn an easy income.

The negative public opinion was particularly heightened by the 1973 Congressional Hearing on Human Experimentation. The hearing was supposed to discuss the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and clarify the ethical and legal implications of human experimental research. This climate called for a conscious public which rallied against the use of vulnerable populations such as prisoners as guinea pigs. Companies and organizations who associated themselves with human testing faced severe backlash. Amidst the numerous senate hearings, public relation nightmares, and opponents to penal experimentation, county prison boards realized human experimentation was no longer acceptable to the American public. Swiftly, human testing on prisoners was phased out of the United States.

Only a renovated gymnasium is considered suitable for holding inmates. That building is frequently used for overflow from other city jails.

The district attorney launched an extensive two year investigation documenting hundreds of cases of the rape of inmates.

The United States had ironically been strong enforcers of the Nuremberg Code and yet had not followed the convention until the 1990s. The Nuremberg code states: “[T]he person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.”

The prison trials violated this definition of informed consent because inmates did not know the nature of materials they were experimented with and only consented due to the monetary reward. America’s shutting down of prison experimentation such as those in the prison signified the compliance of the Nuremberg Code of 1947.

lil place in my backyard...
i've been coming to this spot for over a decade. tragically i've only picked up a camera a few years back. it's nice to be able to visit a location many times in the continuation of self improvement and documenting the destruction of a location. heres a few shots from over the past year:

pano from last summer. i ran here one day as the sun set. i wanted to catch the lighting.

belly of the boiler.

behind the controls. another scrapper hard at work i see.

test shop.

looking down

the next year would be sad times as kids from all over began to populate this place. i used to be able to walk around for weeks without running into a soul, and now there could be 30 kids here.

in a short period of time shity taggers would desicrate the temple. angering the gods.

even the snow doesnt cover that grime.

she sure is a beauty tho. i've been to quite a few generating stations and none compare

it felt like a train station grande hall. standing in the freezing cold taking a pic of snow falling (or ceiling)

so ladylike

everyones favorite hallway which was in a movie for 3 seconds. (relax-its photoshopped.....or is it???)

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Oblivion State exists as an online forum to allow like minded individuals to share their experiences of Urban Exploration. We do not condone breaking and entering or other criminal activity and advise all members to read the FAQ articles about the forum and urban exploring in general. All posts are the responsibility of the original poster and all images remain copyright to the original photographer